Venture

Yo dawg! First arc of the Top Cow comic! Statesman had his powers yoinked just like every other super in Paragon City and then he got killed. Killed hard enough that Numina couldn't resurrect him until Manticore used a very risky move to bring him back. That's recent.

Hell, the man knows what Sapper guns are, right?

The audience is only required to suspend disbelief, not hang it by the neck until dead. H. G. Wells, one of the fathers of speculative fiction, observed that the reader will accept a single fantastic element but not a second. Decades later John W. Campbell would say "I'll swallow one porcupine but not two." Strictly speaking a superhero setting has used up its porcupine at the word superhero. The audience is not required to make allowances every time the writer feels like phoning it in.

I assure you I have no lack of imagination: I can imagine much, much better stories than this.

It sure as hell is. It's almost the definition of the word.

Which is exactly what he did.

If he wasn't, he'd have been dead a long time ago.

"God out of the machine", in Latin. Used originally to refer to a contraption used in ancient Greek theater to hoist actors playing celestial beings over the stage.

Never mind that, notice how time travel conveniently leaves the stage, especially after Wade was considerate enough to spell out everything he's done. "Oh, Cimerora..." *opens Ouroboros portal* "...seen you earlier, dude..."

Paraphrasing Chandler, the easy plan to stop is the one that was 10 years in the making, the one someone tried to get very cute with. The hard plan to stop is the one the guy thought of two minutes before he put it into motion.

Let me put it to you this way: in the thirty years or so that I was an active GM, I don't think a single one of my players would have fallen for this. I'm including the 10-12 year olds I introduced to the hobby.

ur doin it wrong. The point is that he shouldn't even have been there, shouldn't have been giving Wade the head-on confrontation he obviously wanted.

If so, he's a complete idiot, seeing as how he's been depowered and killed before -- recently, in fact.

A man with no real powers went out and killed the daughter of the most powerful hero in the world. Statesman would have to actively try not to turn Wade into a red smear on the ground in a confrontation. It does not take the strategic acumen of Sun-Tzu to see that Wade has a trick up his sleeve and is OBVIOUSLY trying to provoke a response. Actually giving him that response is USDA certified Prime Grade-A stupid. If we were talking about an "ordinary" hero I might let this pass as "reasonable stupidity" if it was the only fly in the ointment (it isn't), but not from Statesman. The guy was a soldier and international criminal mastermind for about 20 years before starting his 80-year tenure as a superhero. If he was actually this dumb he'd have died a long time ago.

He was evil to start with. He was friends with Cole when the two were international art thieves. Cole was only in it to find a cure for his mustard gas poisoning; when he found it (the Well) he went straight. Richter didn't. The idea that he can be redeemed is a complete joke.

Because whether you like it or not, that is what the story is.

Yes, we can handwave away what we don't like. The problem is that we have to.

What's more, in a very real sense, you can't handwave away what you don't like. Yes, you can make up whatever you want and if that's what gets you through the night baby, whatever. But gluing feathers on a rat doesn't make it a swan. The canon is what it is. The story you've made up in your head to make it palatable has no currency here. It means absolutely nothing when we're evaluating the quality of the work.

If it is someone's position that there is no such thing as bad writing, that everything is just a matter of taste, then that person is saying we can't tell the difference between Shakespeare and Stephanie Meyer. That person is then, QED, a moron.

No. I fancy myself a critic. To be a writer someone, somewhere must have paid you to do it. I've never even tried to get published. There's a great quote I read a long time ago and can't track down the provenance of right now: "if you can't outdo Dostoyevsky, we don't need you". I've always believed that even before I read the quote. I'm not going to write the next great American novel and the world doesn't need one more purveyor of mediocrity. I'm sure I can write a better novel than the aforementioned Ms. Meyer but really, who couldn't. (Whether or not it would sell better is another matter, but again you'd have to be an idiot to correlate popularity with quality.) I'd have to be really desperate for money before I'd try earning any that way.

The only indication that she is dead is the use of the word "late". That's pretty thin soup.

I'd say yes, it was done just to torque off Holmes (and, likely, the audience). She got greased like a scrub just to show off Moriarity's villainy.

For Holmes, that's practically an emotional breakdown.

That dog won't hunt. If the map of the United States is radically different then that needs to be explicit: they have to supply the new map. Furthermore, you simply can't change the map enough to accommodate the geography in this case.

Oh, and as for Rhode Island being bigger, that's just a weak excuse for Did Not Do The Research. They just started cramming things in without paying any attention to the geography.

As it turns out, adding bad data to bad data doesn't make it good data.

Knock yourself out. Google Earth is cheap and readily available. Go find a spot on the east coast of the US that's NW of Bermuda, just outside US territorial waters and allows you to place the Rogue Isles so that the east edge of the chain is closer to the east coast than the west edge of the chain.

We'll wait.

No one can deny you your gods-given prerogative to be wrong.

Actually, that would be you. Gameplay and Story Segregation. Your entire argument is absurd. If Paragon City really had people getting mugged by superpowered thugs on every street corner 24/7 no one would live there. Those spawns are a concession to the fact that the game is an amusement park, not a simulation.

Furthermore, you are completely missing the point that Thierry doesn't have one. He is obviously insane and is portrayed as such. There isn't a response option that even remotely looks like "hang your head in shame and admit he's right"; they're all variations on "what a horse's patootie".

As for the street spawns, the best way to deal with them would be to remove them outside of hazard zones. They're a misfeature included to support an outmoded style of play from fantasy MMOs. However, if we really need an "in-universe" way to deal with them, just offer a series of badges for rescuing street crime victims. 15 minutes after that goes live you'll never see another one again.

As has been pointed out, the map is in-game and has been since i6. The mistake was pointed out back then, too, by lots of people.

If they weren't wrong so often I wouldn't have to correct them so much.

Nerva is supposedly contested territory. The i7 PDF says:

The fly in the ointment is the map of the Rogue Isles. Quick, what's wrong with this picture?

CHECKUARY (n) -- 13th month of the year. Begins January 1st and ends when you stop writing the previous year on your checks.

False. The 5-sale limit only provides the illusion of information. Since it's so easily manipulated it's actually worse than useless.